


Things Get Tangled

by theoldgods



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Jossed, Post Season/Series 02, Post-Reichenbach, Potential 3x01 spoilers, Reunions, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-28
Updated: 2013-03-28
Packaged: 2017-12-06 18:27:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/738759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and John tempestuously reunite at a kebab shop--unwittingly brought together by John's long-term girlfriend Mary. 3x01 speculation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Get Tangled

**Author's Note:**

> Based off of filming reports from March 2013 as read at http://tlchimera.blogspot.com/2013/03/setlock-newport-kebab-shop.html. Spoiler/speculation for 3x01. UnBritpicked and unbeta'd, so there are probably Americanisms hiding inside.

It was deliciously quiet, all things considered, as John entered a kebab shop arm-in-arm with Mary. His head ached faintly from the noise of the streets and the lingering ballet music in his head--such a whirl of color and noise, despite its solemnity; he had seen nothing so chaotic as ballet in, well, years now, not since Afghanistan, not since...that period of his life--but all was better inside. The man behind the counter had a pleasant voice, a lilting accented baritone, and the sensation he’d had all night, that one too-forceful breath might cause something to break, had faded.

Under his arm Mary was a solid block of warmth, smiling up at him as he placed their order and guided them toward the back of the shop, where there was a two-seat table tucked away from any windows.

“You’re calmer now,” she murmured as they sat. He looked up in surprise at her voice, at its low pitch but perfectly clear tone, at the hint of a smile lingering underneath it.

“I’ve been calm all evening.” He slid his jacket from his shoulders, let it fall across the back of his chair. “Truly. Ballet is very...calming.”

“Yes, it’s supposed to be.” Her hand on his arm was warm, solid, the fingers gripping like smooth iron. He closed his eyes and felt himself exhale as she massaged his forearm. “Maybe not for you, but that’s okay.”

“I told you--“

“Lies to me are fine, John Watson.” Mary’s breath was at his neck; he shivered, skin prickling at the memory of her mouth across his body, time and time again over the past year. “Lies to yourself are not.”

“I’m not lying to myself.”

“Good.” Mary’s lips covered his briefly before sliding away. “Maybe you’ll want to practice how you lie to me, however,” she continued, meeting his gaze. “Only an idiot wouldn’t know you were wound more tightly than is strictly necessary to watch pretty people in tight silk prance across a stage.”

John shook his head, biting his lower lip to keep from smiling. “I don’t think I _could_ lie to you. It’s just all so--pretty, as you say.”

She framed his cheeks with her hands. “If pretty makes you nervous it’s a good thing you’re with me.”

“ _Delicate_ makes me nervous.” He lifted one of her hands to lay it in both of his, rubbing his thumbs in circles across the backs of her palms, watching as her eyes half closed in delight. “I am a bull in a china shop. I-I break things that are delicate.” For a moment there it was, bloody, spread-eagle on the pavement, with a high-pitched moaning under everything. _He’s my friend_. John cut that out of the front of his mind as quickly as possible. “You are lovely and pretty and most assuredly not in any way fragile.”

Mary was seated with her back to the door, a position John had not been able to assume since his return from Afghanistan. With his eyes locked on her face, her hands, every inch of her skin, his peripheral vision was blurred, and yet he nonetheless noticed the dark figure that slid inside the shop and spoke something to the shopkeeper in an unaccented baritone that matched the kebab man’s own vocal range.

“What are you thinking of?”

Mary’s voice was hushed, her eyes were closed, but still she _knew_. John marveled at her as his tongue answered.

“I’m not thinking; I’m...observing.”

“Danger in the shop, then?” Her voice was light, but underneath John heard the tinge of real concern that crept in now and again--for their actual safety or for his sanity, he was never entirely sure which. “That’s the only time you observe.”

Her hands tightened around his, painful enough to pull his attention fully back to her face. “No. No danger, I’m sure, for you or for me. Any part of me,” he added in a whisper, returning the squeeze. “Not tonight. No dreams tonight. Not with you, not here.” In a normal voice he continued, “What do you mean, anyway, that’s the only time I observe? I always am observing. Or trying to.”

“Yes, dear, and I think that’s because you’re always aware of any trouble.” The shopkeeper called John’s name and he jumped, releasing Mary’s hands. “See?” Her eyes were crinkled with laughter. “Food’s ready.”

John fetched it as she sat back, massaging her fingers. The tray was awkwardly balanced across his palms as he slid it from the counter; near the door, nearly out of his range of vision, a blur of black shifted and a male voice sighed. As John turned back to the table he heard it, the faintest whisper: “Eat first, Doctor Watson.”

He turned around at that, in spite of himself, in spite of the fact that Mary was watching him. Nothing. Not a piece of black anywhere on that side of the room, not a flutter of curls, not a momentary glimpse of anything from _that_ day that stalked the back of his mind like an angry cat. As he returned to Mary with the kebabs he found his brain whirling nonetheless--not, he noted, in the headlong panic it did after a dream of Afghanistan but in the cool, calculated, deducing manner that old flatmate of his had been fond of using.

“Practicing my ballet,” he muttered in response to Mary’s quirked eyebrow, and she laughed, softly.

 _But it_ was _the ballet_ , he realized. _All those figures, so...lithe and yet so coldly composed. Beautifully unconcerned with their own beauty, or at least pretending so. They trigger it in me._ Somehow his face was smiling and his hands were feeding Mary a piece of kebab; her face was serene, her lips curled with contentment as she bit down on food and fingers alike. Was his mask so good nowadays, or was he really simply not disturbed? _And then the customer, the...the Black Baritone who was here._

Hallucinations of all sorts were part of the deal when returning from the desert. He supposed this was no different. He had gone all night--no, _all day_ , spent as it had been in Mary’s bed--without remembering to remember, and even now that he did, there was no burst of pain in his gut, only vague annoyance that he had remembered after all. Ella would have been proud. He wondered, suddenly, what a blog post with the title _The Adventure of the Black Baritone: A Hallucinatory Reflection by John Watson, M.D_. would look like, and then wondered what the password to his blog even _was._ That had all been so long ago, thank God.

His smile became real as Mary fed him kebab in turn.

The food was mostly gone when he saw it again, a movement out of the corner of his eye. A customer--the same from before?--approached the counter and spoke, in a husky voice that sent shivers up his spine. The customer’s words were indistinguishable, as was the shopkeeper’s reply. John felt their eyes on him nonetheless. It happened, sometimes, amazingly. Someone would remember him, as if he had been the celebrity instead of the plus-one, as if he were the martyr instead of the disciple cut loose.

The idea of _him_ \--the other him, the self-diagnosed sociopath him, the _Holmes_ \--as some sort of Jesus made John laugh. Mary looked up and then over her shoulder.

“Oh! I’m sorry to have kept you waiting; I think I entirely forgot.”

John’s face froze at Mary’s words. She knew on some level, as did the rest of London, about John Watson the consulting detective, crime-solver and blogger, although she had been working and living abroad until a year ago. She had been present on one other occasion when a... _fan_...had approached John and had watched the scene unfold with the most bemused expression on her face, an expression that had turned to stone as John’s hands had begun to shake under the table as they always did when he accepted condolences and expressions of undying loyalty. They had not spoken of it afterward, but Mary’s kisses had been fervent that night, the heat of her skin against his particularly comforting. In the afterglow he had murmured three little words to her for the first time.

She, now that he thought of it, had not returned the sentiment. Not then and not ever since. He did not need the words--sometimes he figured his own whispered _I love you_ had been naught but a hallucination--but he knew without looking at their guest that this was another fan, and he did not understand what Mary would have to do with one.

“The ballet is most distracting; I understand.”

 _Jesus,_ but they had gotten good at their dressing-up, their _roleplaying_ , as John had seen it called in the papers. That voice was a dead ringer for _his_ voice, albeit older, hoarser than John remembered. Curiosity pinged in the back of his skull, though he kept his gaze on the remnants of the food.

“Well, thank you for being so kind.” Mary’s voice was low, sweet--flirtatious? The mouldering kebab was losing its fascination. “This is Doctor Watson, as requested.”

“You needn’t be my secretary, Mary,” John muttered, finally meeting Mary’s shining eyes. “I am used to it by now.”

The figure before him had done a lovely job with the dress; that jacket was nearly the same shade and weight as Holmes’s greatcoat. Warmth flooded John’s face at the memory of that fabric swirling in the air around him, hanging on the back of their door, even clenched in his hands that moment they had been handcuffed together and caught one on each side of a fence. For so long his mind had been stuck at the end, at the blood and the dizziness and the way his legs had collapsed under him; to have the rest of the picture suddenly flooding his senses was baffling.

”I must say, you’ve done good with the coat,” John told the man as his eyes lingered on the garment. “Even got the buttonhole, I see; I shudder to think how long you must have stared at pictures of him to get it just so, but I suppose that’s the nature of the game now.”

“John.”

“Yes, that’s--“

For a moment the world was shifting, tilted ninety degrees on its axis, as John studied the face of the man before him. It was thin, with the most prominent cheekbones he’d ever seen, roughly-shorn black curls falling across the man’s forehead. The eyes that stared back at him were slate-gray, shifting a bit to green, to blue, and back again. The last time he’d seen them there had been so much red--

John’s laugh was harsh. “Jesus, you lot are good.” His hands were shaking; Mary frowned.

“The medical establishment is certainly very good, John, but not to the point of resurrecting a man.”

“No,” he agreed, “which is why I’m finding your resemblance to him uncanny.”

“Surely I have not changed so very much.”

Mary was looking from John to the man and back again, eyes narrowing, her face becoming a blur as John’s world shrank, spiraling more and more tightly around him, curiously hot around his eyes.

“I wouldn’t know; I’ve never seen you bef--“

The words stuck in his throat as tears glazed his eyes. Sputtering, cursing his mind for its overactivity and his face for its emotion, he took hold of his chin and pinched, as fiercely as he could. The resulting pain cleared his head but not his vision.

“Right, Mary, I’m sorry; I think it happened after all.”

“What?” Mary was sitting across the table, blurry behind his tears, every part of her beyond his reach. His breath came faster, chest constricting, as he realized this.

“Th-the dreams, the waking dreams, I just dreamt that you brought someone here--“

“But I _did_ , dear. He asked to see you; I know you don’t really like the attention, but he knew rather a lot about you and I figured after the ballet you might find it a treat just to have some admiration--”

“ _I_ am fighting the instinct to call all of this rather tedious.” Jesus God, that voice, that intonation--it was straight out of John’s memory, becoming all the more painful as each moment passed. “Even moreso than being denied a cab ride due to a bit of pig’s blood, and now it's rivaling the tedium of sleeping in gutters chasing criminals around Europe for the past three years.”

“No.”

“John, look at me.”

“Nope. Nothing doing.” John was fixated on the wall behind the man, on the nice stenciling pattern the shop had chosen. London needed more fig leaves in its daily existence, for certain.

“Stubborn berk.” The man shifted, blocking the fig pattern; John determinedly kept his features out of focus as he knelt before him. “John. _I don’t play around._  Everything I do is for the best. I don’t even break into military bases just to investigate disappearing rabbits.” There was a smile in his voice.

John looked down into his eyes; that was his mistake, he would realize later. If he had just left the man kneeling there, the world would have gone on in its quiet way, just he and Mary, exploring London together, using the Tube, never risking life or limb again. But he looked down because Bluebell and all of the stuff at Baskerville--the _truth_ , hidden under layers of fog--had been ultimately a secret known only to three or four outsiders, two of whom had the surname Holmes, and because when he had delivered that line himself he'd laughed at the absurdity of it all.

Their gaze lasted five seconds or more, long enough for Mary to shift her weight back and forth in her chair and for John to realize dimly that they were alone, even the shopkeeper elsewhere. That was _Sherlock_ ’s mistake, he decided as the man got to his feet and he echoed his actions as he had a thousand times in their hunts around London. If the shopkeeper had remained, John would have behaved himself.

“You are standing here telling me that your name is _Sherlock Fucking Holmes_ \--no I don’t care what your middle name actually is or even if you have one, you posh overbred git--whose body I saw lying on the ground outside Bart’s, covered in its own blood with a bashed-in head, and you’re telling me _you don’t play games?_ ”

“Strictly speaking, that wasn’t my own blood--”

“Waltzing around doing Jesus knows fuck-all while I sit here in London dealing with sniveling masses of fans and the _press_ , Good God the press, _I told you the press_ \--“

“And _I_ told you that everything I do is for the best! I couldn’t actually be alive; there were snipers, John, trained to shoot unless I jumped. You do remember the snipers?” Sherlock Holmes was panting and so was John, their chests vibrating up and down. In John's mind's eye they were leaning against the wall in the hall of Baker Street, his limp forgotten, both gasping for air as Sherlock laughed for the first time in their acquaintance, the sound the most ridiculously lovely growl he could imagine hearing. The memory made his next words all the more venomous. 

“You are an arrogant asshole; ‘alone protects me’ my _ass_ , you couldn’t have done that alone and you couldn’t have done it last fucking moment, you knew it would be what Moriarty would want when you went up there, you _knew_ and you took somebody else's help and you let me go on not knowing and then let me think you were dead, playing your bloody game--”

“If you knew beforehand he would have shot you all, John, you and Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson--”

 _“_ So it was preferable instead to make me _completely change my existence anyway_ for the next three years while you were off doing something _\--having adventures!_ \--without me?”

Sherlock pounded the table with a fist that made Mary, already on the corner of her seat, jump and fall backwards to the ground, where she sat unseen by either man.

“It had to be me, only me, you couldn’t know--“

“You couldn’t simply let me in on your precious _secret_? That was too much? It had to be Sherlock Holmes, too _brilliant_ for anyone else, all alone at the end and all alone hunting through whatever it was you’ve been doing--“

“I didn't mean--" his voice spluttered; he pounded the table again "--I did not mean for it to be so painful for you, for you to change _anything_ for me. I’ve been keeping you safe! I’ve been tracking Moriarty’s little network through the muck of Europe for three years and if I had ever misstepped once you’d be dead right now; I did it for _you_ , John--“

John thought of nothing but the motion, the wonderful act of physicality, as he slammed headfirst into Sherlock, mashing their skulls together with a brute force that set his heart singing. As he straightened and watched Sherlock massage his nose, freely dripping blood onto the tile floor, his mouth opened and the words flew out.

“I would rather be _dead_ in the sewers of Europe chasing crime syndicates with you than spend another moment alive knowing that even at the end you couldn’t help but lie to me.”

For a moment there was only Sherlock’s face, staring up at him with brilliant eyes wide; three years apart had not dulled John’s ability to feel pride in having shaken the detective to his core, an instance that occurred rarely enough that John could count it with pride on one hand--and once had done exactly that. A blaze of triumph in his heart leapt up only to run into that horrible pit of realization at what he’d said, not because it had been a lie but because, as ever, it had been all too truthful. Sherlock had lied to him, start to finish, top to bottom, had even come back from the dead to make sure he knew that it had all been a lie.

The door slamming behind John did little to calm his feelings.

* * *

Sherlock Holmes crouched in John’s wake, calculating the number of steps to the door, the swing period of said door, the amount of time it would take for John’s being, so close after so many years, to disappear once more. The blood trickling from his nose was pleasantly cool and tangy after the way his heart had thudded in his skull at John’s words, his accusations, the rage that was all entirely  _wrong_ , beginning to end. This was what he got for planning such things ahead and imagining how they would go; this was what he got for experimenting with  _people_ , he knew, forever more unmanageable than he’d like them to be.

The woman--Mary Morstan, he reminded himself--was getting to her feet, brushing her hair from her eyes, and turning to face him with a face far more composed than he had dared hope.

“I was right about one thing about tonight, at least,” he murmured, noting the way she leaned in to catch his words better. “You truly did not know who I was.”

“No.” Mary was smiling, and Sherlock squinted at that, allowing his mind to run through every possible reason why she would do such a thing. Again and again it stopped on _amusement_. “I’ve always known who John is, but I’d never seen a proper picture of you.”

“Freak or magician?”

“Hmm?”

He swallowed, raised his voice. “Am I a freak or am I a magician, then? People generally choose one or the other.”

Mary considered him for a moment before shrugging. “Both, I presume.”

He scratched his head to draw attention away from his mouth, which was bending dangerously close to a smile of its own.

Outside the air was raw for fall, wind tearing at his unprotected throat. He’d spent some time in London, tracking John, trying to understand what this tall and angular blonde was to him, trying to decide how to reveal himself, but never until now had he thought of the bloodstained scarf he’d left behind with Molly after he’d disappeared that sunny day. If she had given it away he’d be much surprised; her _sentiment_ was surely strong enough to last a few years and a pint or so of blood.

John was pacing the sidewalk, in search of a cab. Sherlock again yearned for a scarf, this time one in which to hide his laughter, and he bolded his mental note to pick up a new one as soon as this business was finished. Beside him the woman Mary was shaking her head and carding her fingers through her hair.

“I'm sorry,” she said after a few minutes’ silent observation of John Watson, M.D., perhaps the worst cab hailer in London.

“Don’t worry; this is normal.” At least it _had_ been normal, for a moment there; as John had raged, Sherlock had fully felt his body, for the first time since plummeting off the roof of St. Bart’s, in all its unwanted nerviness. His body reacted to John’s presence in a way it would for no other, even as John’s behavior registered nowhere on Sherlock’s list of expected outcomes. His body knew and accepted before his mind, it appeared, and that realization was less immediately startling than he would have thought five years before.

“I’ll have a word with him, if you like,” Mary said, raising an eyebrow.

Sherlock shook his head. “This is his problem and mine, not yours.”

“His problems are my problems.”

“Oh?”

“That’s what happens in a relationship. Things get tangled.”

Sherlock eyed her, allowing his thoughts to race for a moment before dragging them back under control. This time when he smiled he allowed her to see it.

“Yes, I suppose they do, don’t they?"

* * *

The cabbie’s accent was too straight, too posh for John’s liking; he’d heard quite enough clipped overwrought English this evening as it was. Turning back for Mary he found her chatting with that  _sociopath_ with entirely too amused an expression in her eyes; he wondered whether Sherlock would notice it and draw the correct emotional cue, as he knew from experience that Mary could be hard to read. He bit his lip at that thought. What Sherlock  _observed_ and  _deduced_ and all the rest was Sherlock’s concern.

John’s heart was still burning in his ribcage, still sending sick little waves of bilious horror into his throat as he remembered the body and Sherlock’s protestation that it had all been for him, for John. It was exactly Sherlock to see horrifying death and the resultant trauma as a sign of attachment and affection, something that one should strive to induce in others. It was precisely Sherlock to assume that one he allegedly esteemed as much as John would survive and accept him back, would think that forced separation wasn’t so much a lie as a necessity, and would carry on blithely after his "death." But when had Sherlock, the brain desperately trying to divorce itself from its body, the man who rushed headlong into life-or-death situations to alleviate boredom and actively did not care about victims of crimes as human beings, become concerned with saving lives for no other reason than to save them?

 _By saving my life he beat Moriarty_ , John reminded himself. _By only pretending to die and then resurrecting himself like Jesus he beat Moriarty. Beating Moriarty has always been priority number one and only for Sherlock Holmes._

 _And if even a sociopath can do things for more than one reason, even if he doesn’t know it at the time?_ another John asked.

John stomped his foot against the pavement. Too many thoughts, too little space in his head.

“Mary!”

It came out tersely; his body, after all, was still furious at Sherlock Holmes for every moment of agony he had endured since Bart’s--since Bart’s the first time, he realized, when a well-dressed computer masquerading as a human being had asked him if he’d served in Afghanistan or in Iraq. As he watched Sherlock watch Mary approach him, watched the way the resurrected detective’s face twitched before falling back into impassivity and the way he dabbed the blood still streaming from his nose, John couldn’t help but wonder whether Sherlock had been a human being masquerading as a computer all along.


End file.
